With companies looking to make changes to the way they do business in the “new normal,” webinars have taken on a new importance when it comes to audience outreach. Meetings and events that used to happen in person with groups of people present, are now happening virtually everywhere across the globe.
At Macro, we've been helping our clients organize webinars and virtual events for years and we thought we'd share some of the knowledge we acquired along the way to help you out. We’re going to be including some best practices guidelines and tips that you can follow to improve your webinars and virtual events.
For this post, we’ll be diving into how to get more people to register for your webinars and virtual events. We’ll be examining 3 tips that you can implement to increase the amount of people registering for your webinar, from improving your email templates to enhancing your landing pages.
1. Experiment With Template Design
Utilizing the same design for your assets in your webinars repeatedly is convenient and easy, but there is one major downside: after a while, a major downside you might encounter is that the templates you’re using are optimized well enough.
By not experimenting with different designs, you can miss out on potential conversions. This is where you can decide to experiment with different templates, formats, and designs with A/B testing strategies. This can go a long way to providing better results from your campaigns.
Text Only or Pre-Designed Email Templates?
Perhaps you’ve come across an issue where your well designed email templates are underperforming, with low open and click through rates. When sending out email invites, it’s generally a best practice to switch up your design formula every once in a while. For instance, plain text emails can be more effective than emails that utilize well-designed HTML templates.
In many cases, text only emails benefit from a click-through rate that is 3 times higher. The main reason plain text emails tend to perform better is that they have a more personalized feel to them, as opposed to fancier HTML emails, which can have the negative effect of making the user feel like they’re being sold to. Data from Hubspot elaborates on this, stating that plain-text emails performed better statistically than HTML emails.
If you’re opting to go for plain text, good quality, flowing copy is key. Make sure you’re communicating your message well by keeping it simple and brief. In general, you should alternate between plain text email invites and HTML designed templates to ensure variety. Remember that stale invites may have the added consequence of reduced engagement and click-through rates. Because of this, it’s a good idea to have two options you can send out to prospects.
Elements of a Good Email Template for Webinar Registration
- Examine your brand guidelines and look at how those colours can be supplemented to enhance the look of your email invites.
- Colour combinations and placement are important when it comes to maintaining the attention of your audience.
- Keep the image to text ratio low. Always compress your images to increase loading times.
- We like using tools like TinyPng or similar to ensure our images are compressed.
- Make sure you use vibrant images
- You can add lively GIFs or short videos to give your event invites a little bit more life.
- Include engaging, well designed Call-To-Actions buttons in your design - add more than text.
- Make sure to space everything out, don’t overcrowd the space you have with content that isn’t sized properly or relevant to your message.
- The time and place of your webinar should always be very clear.
2. Why You Should Implement A/B Testing
A/B testing is an important component of evaluating the effectiveness of your email campaigns. If you’re able to conduct multiple campaigns and have a large enough audience to make this viable, you should always A/B test. The only times where you shouldn’t consider A/B testing is when you know that you'll have low numbers of visitors. In this case, it may not be worth it because it would take too long to achieve statistical significance.
What Are the Benefits of A/B Testing?
Improved Content:
When you’re brainstorming different subject lines to A/B test for instance, you’re taking part in the continuous process of improving your content. Creating different elements to A/B test, may force you to look at other aspects of your campaign that could also be enhanced.
Higher Conversion Rates:
A/B testing lets you easily see and examine what’s working and what’s not, allowing you to select the best performing option. This in turn, will lead to higher conversion rates overall.
A/B Testing in Practice
After you’ve created two separate subject lines for your audience, send the email to a large enough list so that the results are statistically significant. For instance, if you’re running a campaign with 1000 subscribers, you could send an email with an alternative subject line to about 20-30 people.
Equally, if you’re working with even larger figures, you could do a test on 10% of the audience and get your answer as to which email had the better open rate. Don’t forget to try reengaging with the portion of your audience that did not open your email, an understated ‘trick’ is to resend the same email using a different subject line a week later.
Test Different Sender Names and Subject Lines
You may have overlooked sender names and subject lines in the past, but they can make a difference. Statistics show that catchy subject lines can increase email open rates by 33%. Put yourself in the shoes of your prospect and consider what makes you open an email invite. Here are three basic rules you can follow for better email subject lines:
- Communicate what can be gained by opening the email
- Avoid using all-caps, or “click here” bait titles
- Implement personalized subject lines when possible
That last point is critical, as personalization applies to sender names as well. Think about an email you’ve received that had a generic company sender name - it just doesn’t communicate the same level of care and attention that a personalized sender name would. Including a direct representative from your company in the sender name inviting the user has more of a lasting impression.
3. Improve Your Webinar Landing Pages
You might be asking, what can I do to take my landing pages to the next level and push my prospects to make that final decision to register?
Nothing takes the wind out of an email invites sail’s faster than a dull landing page overloaded with copy. A video and some eye-catching icons, images, and banners can go a long way to providing a bit of life to your webinar invite landing page.
Here are some things you can do to ensure that people are compelled to take that last important step:
Incorporate a video that further illustrates the value of your event: As aforementioned in this post, videos can go a long way to adding value to your event invites. They can work wonders on landing pages as well. Consider adding a trailer or preview video of your webinar to further engage the audience.
Make sure your copy is concise: Keep your copy compelling and short. Try to avoid tiring the user out with more copy that you don’t need - they’ll more than likely exit the registration page. Don’t forget to include the date and time of your webinar and biographies of the presenters.
Be aware of the journey your audience is taking: Try communicating different value propositions as to why they should be registering for your webinar.
Don’t forget about design: Good design can go a long way to guiding your prospect to where they need to go on the page. Make sure the layout is well structured with banners, a lively colour scheme, and a compelling CTA.
Optimize your forms: Don’t include forms that have many fields. Doing so would require that your prospects hand over a lot of information they don’t want to share. Only ask for what you need, i.e. name, email address, and industry if relevant.
A/B Test Your Landing Pages
Optimizing your landing pages with A/B testing techniques can have a surprisingly positive impact. Much like emails, there are a number of elements you can A/B test to improve your conversion rate on your landing pages. For instance, you can experiment with different CTA’s, forms, images, and copy.
With CTA’s you can make a few simple changes, like altering their placement on your page and choosing whether or not you want to place it above or below the fold. Making copy changes to your CTA can have a positive impact on your conversion rate. One example provided by HubSpot, showed that conversion rates increased by 14.79% when the phrase “Order Information and Prices” was changed to “Get Information and Prices.”
Like emails, being as concise as possible with your copy is critical. Make sure the landing pages you’re testing are different enough (take different approaches to communicating the value of your webinar) to make the exercise worth it.
Experiment with different headers, banners, and forms types - arranging these elements differently on the landing pages you're testing.
What We Do
Trying out these four steps can make a difference in your event registration numbers, improving your communication and outreach efforts. Macro’s team of advisors can conduct a comprehensive review of your current event marketing and webinar strategy, help you implement these key steps and more. Speak to an advisor today to see how we can help take your virtual event strategy to the next level.